Julie Taymor Talks The Tempest, Spider-Man

Julie Taymor Talks The Tempest, Spider-Man

Writer-director Julie Taymor is in Cannes promoting her film take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which Icon International is selling in the market. “Isn’t it Disney?” I asked Lionsgate UK’s Nick Manzi. He responded: “Yes, but not all over the world.”

The $20-million indie-funded Miramax pick-up, long in the works, is finally coming out in December via Disney’s Touchstone label, which is fine with Taymor. She says the film wasn’t ready for Cannes (it is screening in the market, though not for press) and will likely play the fall fest circuit en route to a December award-season opening. However mainstream or commercial the movie turns out to be, with Helen Mirren as Prospera, Ben Whishaw as Ariel and Djiman Hounsou as Caliban, costumes (Oscar-winner Sandy Powell), cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh), production design (Mark Friedberg) and score (Elliot Goldenthal) should be factors in the Oscar mix. (Mirren has a second movie in the market here, her husband Taylor Hackford’s Love Ranch.)

Two-part flip-cam interview is below.

Taymor’s still working on Broadway musical Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark which is a go for a Hilton Theatre fall 2010 opening with Bono and Edge’s music, but she is unwilling to finalize casting and an opening date as yet. Peter Parker will be played L.A. rocker Reeve Carney, who stars in The Tempest as young prince Ferdinand. Taymor was only mentioning Thomas Mann’s Transposed Heads as a pie-in-the-sky project she’d like to do someday, she told me. It’s early days yet on that one.

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Zhao said with her Bass Reeves biopic, she’ll direct a more traditional cast like she did with her first-timers: “You can work with an actor in a certain way, you can create an environment like Terrence Malick has always done.”